August 3rd, 2013

Meanwhile, the people at Big Finish had been busy. They’d got the license to create new Doctor Who audio adventures, initially featuring the fifth, sixth and seventh Doctors, and had started with a range that was more-or-less straightforward pastiche of the TV show, although generally with a standard of writing that was much higher than it had been during the time those Doctors were on the TV.

June 30th, 2013

By the early 1990s, it had become clear, despite the BBC’s occasional claims otherwise, that Doctor Who would not be returning to the TV any time soon.

While the New Adventures were an acceptable substitute for many Doctor Who fans — and in the opinion of many even an improvement on the TV show — there were those who simply weren’t satisfied by words on a page, and needed to see old character actors being menaced by improbable monsters before they could feel fully happy.

April 1st, 2013

Eric Saward hasn’t received a lot of love in these essays so far, but in the last full series he script-edited, Colin Baker’s first, he finally found a coherent aesthetic vision for Doctor Who. Whereas previously he’d been content to throw in as much violence and references to old stories as he could, by this point he had been converted to The Church Of Bob Holmes, and had come up with a semi-formula for the show that worked in the three stories that year where he could try it — comic double acts, vicious black humour, and a smattering of post-modernism with characters commenting metafictionally on the action. The fact that new companion Peri’s catchphrase became “all of these corridors look alike to me” gives a hint of the way Saward’s thoughts were trending.